Learn Riverside in one 5 minute cut.
Riverside records remote interviews and podcasts at studio quality by capturing each participant locally instead of over the call. This lesson drills why local tracks beat call recordings, running a session that cannot lose takes, and cutting highlights with Magic Clips.
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Record the call, or record the people?
A Zoom recording captures the internet connection; Riverside captures each person's actual microphone and camera. Everything else about the product follows from that one difference.
Per-person tracks
Each guest's audio and video record on their own device at full quality, up to 4K, and upload progressively during the call. A glitchy connection ruins the conversation, not the recording.
The session room
You host guests in a browser Studio with pre-flight checks for mic, camera, and headphones. Most ruined recordings die in the first five minutes; the checklist exists for a reason.
Magic Clips
After the session, AI transcribes everything, finds highlight moments, and cuts vertical clips. One long recording becomes a content pipeline instead of a single episode.
What you will do in the lesson
Five clips, already on the track. You answer and try things. Nobody demonstrates at you for five minutes.
- Diagnose a ruined recording. You listen to echo, drift, and dropout examples and name the cause of each. Every one of them is preventable, which is the point.
- Run the pre-flight. Order the checks that happen before anyone says the first real sentence. Headphones on every participant is the single highest-value rule in remote recording.
- Use separate tracks like an editor. You see why per-person tracks matter: mute one guest's dog without touching the host, level a quiet speaker independently. Mixed-track recordings allow none of it.
- Mark moments live. Practice flagging highlights during the conversation instead of rediscovering them later. Ten seconds of marking saves an hour of scrubbing.
- Cut clips from the transcript. You review Magic Clips suggestions and pick the ones actually worth posting. The AI proposes; the editor in you disposes.
Drag or scroll the rail to see every clip.
Before you start
What do my guests need on their end?
A link, a desktop Chrome or Edge browser or the mobile app, and headphones. No account and no software knowledge; the Studio walks them through mic and camera checks when they join.
Do I need to install anything for this lesson?
No. The lesson runs in this page, free, no signup. Riverside itself is also browser-based when you get to it, and there is a free way to try it.
What happens if the internet drops mid-interview?
The local recording on each device keeps going, and the upload resumes when the connection returns. The call may hiccup, but the tracks you edit later stay clean. That resilience is the core reason to record this way.
Why not just record the Zoom call?
Zoom records the compressed stream, one mixed track at whatever quality the network allowed that day. Riverside records source quality per person. If the recording is only a meeting memo, Zoom is fine; if you will edit or publish it, the difference is audible in the first sentence.
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